I know several folks are headed to Colorado this coming weekend for Grub(woo-hoo!), but why stop there? The following weekend there is a hat tournament in Crested Butte that should be awesome! I'm hoping to hike over from Aspen(less than 10 miles) on Friday, then carpooling back on Sunday. All are welcome to join!

I wish. Go to the ice cream shop in town, Third Bowl. They have the coolest homemade flavors. And a super cute girl named Ellen works there._________________This is not the signature you are looking for

I wish. Go to the ice cream shop in town, Third Bowl. They have the coolest homemade flavors. And a super cute girl named Ellen works there. Man..those warm nights last summer were some of the best of my life. I would drive my dad's jalopy to the boardwalk and pick her up after work. Ellen loved it when I would read poems to her. I used to tell her I wrote them and she would giggle but we both knew I got them from my poetry course I took last Spring at Ithica. Eventually, when I used up all the prose, we would just lay there and listen to the waves, feeling the morning, and further, August getting closer. I told her I loved her and I don't know if she believed it or even if I did but laying there, humping in the sand, it felt too right not to. We wrote back and forth to each other that fall, but by November the letters had run dry. I met up with Thad, the midget that ran the ferris wheel, in the city not long ago and he told me he heard Ellen's father had died of stomach cancer on Christmas Eve. Her mother started drinking heavily after that and sent her to live with her aunt in Indiana. I decided to look her up not long ago. She was working at a Dairy Queen and attending Picadilly Jr High School. She told me she was married to Zac Johnston, the captain of the Jr High Football team, and that she didn't think he'd like the idea of me visiting. He drinks a lot and, though she didn't come right out and say it, likes to take the pressure of being the quarterback out on her face. We just laughed about old times then the operator told me I owed a new dime. I didn't have one so we said our goodbyes. Ellen waited just a second before hanging up. I asked what the matter was and she just sighed and said 'It's just..well..Eric...the baby...the baby is y..'. The sound of a dialtone cut her off. I'll never know what she was going to say because Ellen, well, Ellen died at a cheerleading convention from a botched trust fall a couple months later. We had spoke of meeting up some time later in life but I'm now accepting that it won't ever happen. But hey, at least we'll always have that summer on the boardwalk.

_________________It's hard to get a table for one at Chucky Cheese when you look like I do....Oh, you're out of that? Then just give me Vice President of Ultimate Frisbee.

If I had been going for Kerouac I would've ended the story of Ellen after 'humping in the sand'._________________It's hard to get a table for one at Chucky Cheese when you look like I do....Oh, you're out of that? Then just give me Vice President of Ultimate Frisbee.